Announcing appearances, publications, and occasional thoughts on natural philosophy and ancient history by philosopher, historian, and author Richard Carrier.

Richard Carrier is the renowned author of several books including Sense and Goodness without God and Proving History, as well as numerous articles online and in print. His avid readers span the world from Hong Kong to Poland. With a Ph.D. in ancient history from Columbia University, he specializes in the modern philosophy of naturalism and humanism, the origins of Christianity, and the intellectual history of Greece and Rome, with particular expertise in ancient philosophy, science and technology. He has also become a noted defender of scientific and moral realism, Bayesian reasoning, and the epistemology of history. For more about him and his work visit www.richardcarrier.info.

EVENTS

A whole awesome conference, in North Dakota! Don’t miss out. And help them promote it, by telling anyone you know who might be interested and free this weekend to come and hang out. Zeteticon is in Fargo, North Dakota (September 13th-14th)…

Like this:

Here continues my series on reviews of my book On the Historicity of Jesus. If you know of reviews I haven’t covered, post them in comments (though please also remark on your own estimation of their merits).

-:-

This series has covered another series begun by Nicholas Covington. I have already commented on earlier entries (see parts 4 & 5). Today I shall comment on 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, and 11.

Like this:

Here continues my series on reviews of my book On the Historicity of Jesus. If you know of reviews I haven’t covered, post them in comments (though please also remark on your own estimation of their merits).

-:-

This series has covered another series begun by Nicholas Covington. I have already commented on earlier entries (see part 3). Today I shall comment on parts 4 and 5.

Like this:

I was asked about remarks made by Chris Guest (President of the Australian Skeptics, Victorian Branch) at this year’s TAM. He gave a quick twenty minute talk on Bayesian reasoning and its abuses, with which I entirely concur. (This talk begins with Guest’s introduction at timestamp 48:30.) He criticizes my work briefly at the end, but understanding his remarks there require understanding his remarks throughout the talk. His only mistake is that when he gets to my work, he makes one crucial mathematical error that invalidates his entire critique…[Read more…]

Like this:

Here continues my series on reviews of my book On the Historicity of Jesus. If you know of reviews I haven’t covered, post them in comments (though please also remark on your own estimation of their merits).

-:-

This series has included another series begun by Nicholas Covington. I have commented on part 1 and on part 2. Today I shall comment on part 3.

Notably I have long agreed with his overall thesis: objectively, the historicity of Jesus is no more important than the historicity of Socrates, and is really only an interesting question in history. It’s not an earth-shattering thesis in counter-apologetics. It would be only if we had smoking-gun scale evidence against historicity, and we don’t, due to the paucity of evidence survival and its hugely compromised state (OHJ, chs. 7 § 7 and 8 § 3-4 and § 12; also chs. 4, Element 22, and 5, Element 44). For example, if Christianity were based on the belief that a flying saucer was found at Roswell and alien bodies recovered from it and autopsied by the government, the evidence against that even having happened would certainly be exhibit A in any refutation of Christianity. But we have in the Jesus case nothing like the survival of evidence we have in the Roswell case. Hence I’ve made the point before: Fincke Is Right: Arguing Jesus Didn’t Exist Should Not Be a Strategy.

My interest in it is because I’m a historian, whose specializations include ancient religions and the origins of Christianity, I was paid with a research grant to study the issue, and the way Christian dogma and faith beliefs have infected even secular study of the subject is a serious issue long overdue for a correction. Exactly as happened for the Patriarchs: Christian dogma and faith beliefs infected even secular study of that subject until a serious corrective effort was launched in the 1970s which has resulted in what is now a mainstream consensus among non-fundamentalist experts that the Old Testament Patriarchs are mythical persons who almost certainly never really existed. Christianity was not thereby overthrown. But the shift was nevertheless necessary to maintain the respectability of biblical history as an honest profession. The same is now true of the debate over the historicity of Jesus, as even historicity advocate Philip Davies has said.

The end result has been, I believe, a lot of increased clarity and discovery concerning many issues in the origins of Christianity, and not just the target issue of how certain we can be that Jesus was even a person. Readers of my book will notice that every chapter has wide utility for counter-apologetics without even having to mention much less affirm the non-existence of Jesus; you will recognize a lot of cherished Christian apologetical shibboleths being demolished there, and the citations of sources and scholarship extremely useful to anyone taking them on. But even apart from counter-apologetics, our understanding of ancient religion, ancient culture, ancient politics, and earliest Christianity, is significantly advanced and made more coherently clear by the effort. Which is as it should be. That’s a historian’s job.

Like this:

Continuing my series on early reviews of my book On the Historicity of Jesus, today I am writing about the detailed review by F. Ramos. If you know of reviews I haven’t covered by now (or follow-up segments of reviews I did cover), please post them in comments (though please also remark on your own estimation of their merits).

-:-

This review is by a person of unknown interests and qualifications. It is an extraordinarily long Amazon review (well over 10,000 words altogether), by someone named F. Ramos (who even continued their review in comments on another customer review, but that I address there). Since Amazon reviews can be edited after the fact, I will be commenting on the version that existed originally (which I have saved for reference). I have no control over whether anything in it subsequently changes.

Ramos’s review is largely disingenuous and often makes false claims about the book, and covertly defends Christian fundamentalism throughout. For example, he often asks rhetorical questions as if I had no answer, without telling readers that those questions are answered in the very books he is referring to. He likewise often implies the book doesn’t address something, when in fact it does. And when he does that, he offers no response to what the book actually argues. Meanwhile the evidence throughout his review reveals he is a Christian fundamentalist who can’t abide the conclusion that Jesus didn’t exist and needs to rationalize his way out of it, in the face of an extremely tight argument against him. Indeed, he cannot even abide the notion that the Gospels aren’t true accounts of Jesus!

Like this:

I shall continue my series on early reviews of On the Historicity of Jesus next week. But for the weekend I’ll just post a little embarrassing bit about Bart Ehrman I’ve just not found a spot to fit it in until now. Bart Ehrman has so far been refusing to engage with my book or its argument, and instead just complains about being criticized, without ever responding to any of my more serious criticisms, in a most suspicious and conspicuous fashion. And since my last commentary on this, he has avoided ever responding to me, until this April…sort of.

Like this:

Last week I did a series on early reviews of my book On the Historicity of Jesus. If you know of reviews I haven’t covered, post them in comments (though please also remark on your own estimation of their merits).

-:-

One of those early reviews began a series by Nicholas Covington. Last week I commented on part 1. Here is my commentary on part 2, which deals with Paul’s reference to James. More to come. Here I’ll just comment item by item. But those who want to can skip all the commentary and go directly to my two-paragraph summary.